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I honestly have never used cfl's but from what I read you want to look at true wattage not equivalent wattage. So for your case you would probably want to use like 4 or more of them bulbs and maybe attach to a power strip with these

Wattage/size none of that matters. To put it very simple the only two things you want to look at on a CFL bulb are color (6500k for veg, 2700k for flower) and most importantly lumens. If your talking about CFLs you can plug into a normal outlet just worry about the lumens, it says somewhere what the actual wattage is like a 100 watt uses 26 watts. I paid 35$ for 4 100watt cfls the other day and put them into 4 work lamp sockets theyre each rated for like 1300 lumens or so total they are putting around 7000 ...just a little less that my 125$ Hydrofarm T5 2ft 4bulb fixture which outputs 8000 lumens altogether. The mogul based CFL bulbs are actual wattage so 125 watt mogul CFL will be somewhere around 10,000 lumens but you can't plug those into normal household sockets. Hope this helps

and 15,000 lumens for a 3x4 veg area is definitely nice but i'm totally against CFL's for flowering i should mention so I would never need to buy a cfl in the 2700k range except I may change out the bulbs in my fixtures when I go into flowering just to attach the walls around the plant give plenty of light under the canopy while fitting a 1000watt hps above should get a huge yield off 4 plants

Lumens are a unit of light that exclusively measures light output visible for the human eye. Has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on PAR (photosynthetically active radiation) or chloroplast activation for encouraging photophosphorylation.

Quote:bm90191 said:and 15,000 lumens for a 3x4 veg area is definitely nice but i'm totally against CFL's for flowering i should mention so I would never need to buy a cfl in the 2700k range except I may change out the bulbs in my fixtures when I go into flowering just to attach the walls around the plant give plenty of light under the canopy while fitting a 1000watt hps above should get a huge yield off 4 plants

And if you just MUST use lumens as a measurement, then 15K for 12 ft^2 is abysmal for healthy, dense veg. If you equate a 600W light being 100,000 lumens, you'll see what I mean.

Quote:Harry_Ba11sach said:If you feel like putting some effort in you can get a nice reflector made up as well. Don't forget that more than 60% of the light from a bulb shines away from the plants, so reflectors are very key.

Here are two different reflectors I made for seedlings and clones using CFL's a couple years ago. Let me know if you need clarification on anything I did here;

dude super simple reflector spent 6$ on one of these its got the outlet already ready to screw the bulb in, theyre rated up to 300 watts. They have a reflector to direction the light already and it's a little dull so I used to extra mylar around the inside to make it more reflective. AND to make things better they have that clip that you can secure to anything and rotate and tighten where you want it. Seriously they work great! I think they're a little safer than just using those socket things. Hope this helps

also note the mylar is kind of important because the dullness absorbs light which creates a little more heat, not a whole lot if you had a big room but enough to raise a small one a couple degrees. The mylar reflects and doesn't absorb so no heat is transfered to the metal reflector.

true but none of the lumens are wasted with the clip on reflectors and like i said the clips make em super easy to hang. I guess i'm also ocd about things looking neat lol, I think a hanging bulb duct taped up (despite its an awesome idea and super effective) it would just bug me I wouldn't be able to deal with it haha

Quote:Harry_Ba11sach said:If you feel like putting some effort in you can get a nice reflector made up as well. Don't forget that more than 60% of the light from a bulb shines away from the plants, so reflectors are very key.

Here are two different reflectors I made for seedlings and clones using CFL's a couple years ago. Let me know if you need clarification on anything I did here;

Harry, where did you get those black hook ups for the lights?? im trying to get out of using an extension cord holding all the lights.